Re: [boost] [General] Always treat std::strings as UTF-8

Subject: Re: [boost] [General] Always treat std::strings as UTF-8
From: Artyom (artyomtnk_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-15 09:46:10

> > 3. Under non-windows platform that should do anything to  strings and pass 
>them

> > as is as
> >
> >     native  POSIX api is narrow and not wide.
> 
> Yet you still need to convert between  UTF-8 and the POSIX locales.
> Even if most recent POSIX systems use UTF-8 as  their locale, there is no 
> guarantee of that.
> Indeed, quite a few still  run in  latin-1.
> 

No you don't need convert UTF-8 to "locales" encoding as char* is native
system API unlike Windows one. So you don't need to mess around with encodings
at all unless you deal with text related stuff like for example collation.

The **only** problem is badly designed Windows API that makes
impossible to write cross platform code.

So the idea that when we on windows we treat "char *" as UTF-8 and 
then call Wide API after converting it from UTF-8.

There is no problem with this.

As long as all library use same policy there would be no issues
using Unicode any more.

The problem is not locales, encodings or other stuff, the problem
is that Windows API does not allow you to use "char *" based
string fully as it does not support UTF-8 and platform independent
programming becomes total mess.

Artyom